


singing with your voice

by endquestionmark



Series: Howl [2]
Category: Luther (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 08:50:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Justin Ripley is the Met’s special case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	singing with your voice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gogollescent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/gifts).



> Okay, I'm not even sure where this went, and I'm so sorry it's such a mess as a result. I started out with the idea of writing Luther/Ripley, because there's so much loyalty in this partnership, and it ended up veering into a semi-continuation in a universe I'd played in earlier. Hope this is all right, and best of the season to you and yours!

Justin Ripley is the Met’s special case.

To be precise: Justin Ripley is the one copper who tests positive for active Day-Vaughan, in an uncontrolled state of amplification, and has been both retained and allowed to remain on active duty. More importantly, he hasn’t been sectioned or imprisoned as a danger to society and self. One really has to prioritize in these situations.

Of course, his status as DV-positive is hardly a secret. Even if he hadn’t been forced to declare it on his original intake forms (and literally every single piece of paper he’s had to sign since), the Met is essentially one big gossip mill that occasionally keeps the peace, when it’s not busy speculating about it instead. Within ten minutes of him checking the little box in Rose Teller’s office, despite the fact that she had the door closed and locked and all the blinds down, the news had made it halfway to the mortuary. _Look out for that new kid, I hear his bite is worse than his bark._ Ha bloody ha.

Of course, the Met is also equal-opportunity horrible to those it sees as easy pickings, and deevee or not, a new copper is always easy pickings. This is probably why the first thing John Luther asks Ripley is what he did wrong.

Nothing, of course. He’s not that stupid. Being deevee is essentially being on permanent probation, and he can’t afford to make any mistakes. He’s not sure he can afford for John to make any, either, which makes him wonder why he put in to be partnered with him in the first place, but. But then John walks into that interview room, tilts his head just so, and Ripley remembers.

There’s something about John. Ripley isn’t quite sure how to quantify it - some people just seem naturally so, the sort to walk into a room and make it crystallize, freeze around them, air turned solid. He - Ripley, that is - has been testing positive since the age of six, when he snarled at a boy on the playground and the boy screamed and ran. Ever since then, he’s been seeing them - in Boots, waiting for coffee, crossing the street. There’s just something about deevees; perhaps it’s the way they carry themselves, as if they’re on the hunt or hunted. There is never any middle ground.

John comes out of that interview room as though it’s on fire, and Ripley loses his train of thought again (again!) watching him, head turning as though it’s on a string. That’s what it is about John - something that he just can’t look away from, a wildfire, a bridge collapse. Teeth and claws in the night? Ripley wishes he could tell. If it were just him - if he were the only one unable to look away - then yes, maybe, maybe then he’d have some damn clue. But as it is, it’s everyone in the room - it’s Alice Morgan, red and smiling; it’s Rose Teller, harried (she always reminds Ripley of a terrier when she barks); it’s Ian Reed, skeptical as always. Nobody can look away. Ripley tries, and fails.

It’s driving him utterly up the damn wall. John goes for the car, and Ripley feels it like a tug at his chest; he can’t help looking up when John storms in, feeling his pulse speed up - and then, of course, John’s keyboard comes through the glass window of his office. Everybody’s looking by then, but. But.

Ripley feels _kept_ , and he doesn’t know how to respond - somewhere in the back of his mind there’s frustration, and there’s a tug to break away, but it’s all overwhelmed by loyalty. It’s washed away by the riptide that is John Luther, walking human disaster, possible deevee, and currently picking glass out of the carpet and looking sheepish about it, and Ripley fights the urge to go over and help him, and fights the urge to look over, and scores a neat line of slashes into the underside of his desk instead.

Then he looks over anyway.

++

They close the Alice Morgan case on lack of evidence. John throws his phone at the wall and storms out of the building (his office window is still duct-taped over, since Teller refuses to have the glass put in until John’s gone and got himself to anger management. Ripley doesn’t expect that’s going to happen any time soon). Ripley picks it up and goes after him, and halfway down the stairs he notices it - the scratches, four in a row, down the back of the casing.

John’s in the car by the time he gets down the basement parking, and he chucks it in the window. “You left this,” he said. “Though I’m not sure you particularly wanted it, but.”

“Thanks,” John said. “Could’ve done without, but.” He grimaces, hits the 

And that’s it. That’s it, because he puts his foot down on the gas and peels up the ramp to the street, and Ripley is going to shred John’s office. He’s going to go upstairs and scratch all the walls and shred the papers and tip the filing cabinets over, and.

He doesn’t, of course, because he can’t afford to. He does go and burn through half the back paperwork he’s yet to do, because he believes in channeling your frustration; he also takes all the scrap paper he’s got in a box under his desk and shreds it, because that doesn’t always mean channeling it into something useful. He also dumps the box of paper scraps under John’s desk, because it makes him feel considerably better.

Then he goes out, has a pint with Teller, commiserates over the utter catastrophe that John Luther, as a coworker and a human being, is on a daily basis, and, at three in the bloody morning, gets a text saying that John won’t be in for work.

 _Fuck it,_ he decides, shuts his alarm off, and drops his phone in the waste basket. He’ll deal with it whenever he wakes up.

++

He wakes up at three in the afternoon. Shredding paper must have taken more out of him than he thought.

He makes breakfast, which includes a lot of bacon - cooking red meat is more effort than it’s worth, sometimes - and thinks about four lines scored into John’s phone, the way he asked Alice to show her teeth, lip twitching in sympathetic response, thinks about the way his eyes barely flash, sometimes, backlighting or reflection or. Or.

The moon is full that night, and Ripley follows the arc of it across the sky, wonders, wonders.

He considers calling John, and goes out for a run instead. The streets light up one at a time, moonlight streaming through the soot and cloud, and he follows it right to John’s front door.

Alice is climbing down the fire escape, eyes yellow in the lamplight, and she sees him and smiles, baring her fangs. “Puppy,” she says, swinging herself over the edge of the last landing and letting herself fall. She drops into a crouch, then straightens up. “Couldn’t keep away, could you.”

“What the hell are you doing here,” Ripley spits, because he has priorities that include the accused _murderer_ who’s currently outed herself as a deevee.

“Ah, ah, ah,” she says, shaking her finger. “John’s taken me in, did you know? Well, I say taken me in. I suppose he was rather taken in himself.”

Ripley understands, then. He understands that John has, for whatever reason, taken Alice under his protection; he understands that Alice is as much his as he is hers; he understands that when they both look at John, they see whatever it is that makes people afraid of the shadows, the snap of a twig, a far-off howl in the night.

“He really will ruin us,” Alice says, and holds her hands out, palms up, to show her claws, snicking back into skin. “Go on up, then, puppy, he’s waiting,” she adds, and smiles, eyes and teeth flashing like the Cheshire cat.

Ripley doesn’t wait for her to fade into the shadows; he takes a running start and gets his hands on the lowest rung of the ladder, and then climbs. It isn’t far - three stories, well-lit by the moon, and his eyes gather the light as though it were sunlight.

John is waiting at the top, legs dangling over the edge of the roof, and he doesn’t even startle when Ripley climbs over the ledge and sits, breathing heavily, beside him. He must have heard them, smelled him, perhaps.

“I won’t tell,” Ripley says, before John can do anything drastic, like drop his phone off the roof. (It wouldn’t make any sense to, but that’s never stopped him in the past.) “She knows I won’t tell.”

“Don’t tell me she threatened you,” John says, not moving.

“She wouldn’t,” Ripley says. “I think she actually cares, you know.”

John doesn’t reply to that, which really says quite a lot.

“So do I,” he adds, after a minute.

John looks at him then, in the eyes, and Ripley fights the urge to roll over, hold out his hands, anything to signify defencelessness, acceptance - 

“I’m sorry,” John says. “Are you sure you didn’t do something awful to end up with me?”

Ripley just looks at him, because that sentence is so far from anything he can even imagine, and John laughs. “All right,” he says. “If you’re sure.” He settles one arm around Ripley, across his shoulders.

Ripley edges closer to him, partly because his windbreaker only does so much, and partly because it feels somehow right. He wants to rub his jaw along John’s shoulder; he wants to scent him; he wants to follow him through hell and back.

(He will.)

The moon is still barely halfway up the sky, though. They have time.


End file.
